Prayer Power – Sunday, March 23, 1980
During a winter month in one of this country’s northern states, an eleven-year-old boy was playing with his friends when a wall of wet snow collapsed on him and buried him alive. Helplessly pinned with his arms behind him, he felt the snow stiffen and freeze entombing him and paralyzing his body. Soon he would die of suffocation.
Meanwhile rescuers frantically dug through the snow slide as rapidly as they dared and pushed long poles into the snow to find him. Nothing worked until one of the rescuers turned to a powerful force. Moments later the young man was found, and his life was saved.
The power that saved him was prayer. The rescuer who found him offered a prayer for guidance and it was answered.1
Yes, the power of prayer can literally guide us and save us, and it can bring us other benefits as well.
As one author wrote, “Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education.”2
Guidance, courage, comfort, education, these and other blessings come from prayer. It’s unfortunate that we don’t draw on this power more effectively to bless our own lives and the lives of those about us.
Perhaps we feel that prayer is mysterious, beyond our comprehension. And yet we casually put a plug into a wall and immediately tap power that may have been genera1ed hundreds of miles from our home. Power that was stored in coal or oil or gas. The power of a billion raindrops falling on a distant mountain, coursing in a river and captured by a hydroelectric generator. We may even be drawing power from the submicroscopic world of the atoms as they whirl and smash in their unseen orbits.
Mysterious? Incomprehensible? For most of us, yes. But how dark, cold and inconvenient our world would be if we refused to use electricity because we did not understand everything about it.
And thus, it is with prayer. We may not know quite how it works, but we don’t need to. The Lord has not burdened us with complicated formulas. He has made the process of prayer so simple that a humble child on his knees can make it work. The only requirements are that our desires be righteous, and our supplication be sincere. The Lord stands ever anxious to assist us… Ask and it shall be given you,”3 he said.
Many marvelous things are done every day in our world of wonders, but it may be that when the histories of mankind are compiled, we will find that the world was preserved not so much by the works we did each day, as by the prayer we offered each night.
1 The Deseret News, Wednesday, February 20, 1980, p. A1.
2 The Brothers Karamazov, Feodor Dostoievsky, Trans by Constance Gamett, Grosset & Dunlap, New York. (No copyright date), p. 354.
3 The New Testament, Matthew 7:7.
“The Spoken Word” heard over KSL and CBS from the Tabernacle, Temple Square Salt Lake City, Utah, March 23, 1980 11:30 a.m. to 12:00 noon, Eastern Time Copyright 1980 Bonneville Productions
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March 23, 1980
Broadcast Number 2,640